Satellite and cable TV service providers allow customers to watch television or listen to the radio in any room having a TV or radio and an associated set-top box. However, to watch TV in different rooms of a house, the house owner must, firstly, subscribe to multi-room service offered by a TV service provider and, secondly, have supporting hardware, in the form of a TV and set-top box, for receiving and displaying cable or satellite TV in each room, which might be prohibitively expensive.
The demand for mobile content and the convergence of mobile communications and TV media is anticipated as leading to a dramatic increase multimedia consumption, which, in turn, introduces technical challenges associated with network capacity and signalling, as well as associated with delivering that content. The 3GPP Releases 10, 11 and 12 prescribe requirements for evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (eMBMS) to support LTE multi-party content distribution. Content providers can distribute, for example, TV content within a defined area using LTE infrastructure. However, this requires the service or content providers to make their content available via LTE infrastructure.